As a youth, Primo Levi became fascinated by the laboratory, a site where the mysteries of the material world are unlocked and substances reveal their deepest truths. In this graceful, vital book—originally published in Italian in 1975—his passion for chemistry spans his extraordinary life story, with each chapter’s theme anchored in a different element of the periodic table. Beginning with his childhood in Italy’s Piedmontese Jewish community, Levi narrates his years as a student and fledgling scientist, before the descent of World War II, when he fought as an anti-fascist partisan until his arrest and transportation to Auschwitz. After surviving captivity, he returned to his work as a chemist and as a writer, striving in both realms to transmute matter into meaning. An artistic masterpiece of the highest order, The Periodic Table champions the power of friendship and curiosity to transcend times of tyranny and testifies to the fundamental interconnectedness of all the stuff of the universe—including us.
